Ana Vaz, artist and filmmaker, was born in the Brazilian Midwest, a landscape inhabited by ghosts buried beneath the modernist federal capital of Brasília. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and as an instrument capable of transforming human perception, expanding its connections and becoming with other forms of life, both other-than-human and spectral. Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective, an interdisciplinary group that works at the intersection of ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.
‘I take cinema as a perspectivist medium, a medium able to produce partial realities, building artifices as worlds, world-forms made from myriad perspectives.’
(Extract from the essay ‘Filming in the Dark’ by Ana Vaz, published in the anthology What is Real? ed. Andréa Picard, Post-Éditions, 2018)
Her first feature film, É Noite na América (2022), won awards at Locarno, Festival dei Popoli, Entrevues Belfort, and FIDOCS. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘O que aconteceu ainda está porvir’ at Cinema Batalha (Porto, Portugal) and Solar (Vila do Conde, Portugal); ‘It is Night in America’ at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), Pivô (São Paulo, Brazil) and Escola das Artes (Porto, Portugal); High Line Channels (New York, US). Her films and installations have also featured in group exhibitions such as ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ at the 24th Prix de la Fondation Ricard (Paris, France); ‘L’écorce’ at CRAC Alsace (Altkirch, France); ‘Shéhérazade, at night’ at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France).
Programme:
A ÁRVORE (THE TREE), 2022, 20’32’’
Commissioned by Azkuna Zentroa (Spain) for a collective exhibition sketching a constellation of filmmakers from different generations inspired by Bruce Baillie’s universe, curated by Garbiñe Ortega.
Ana Vaz: ‘In October of 2018, a year of overwhelming political and personal transformations, I decided to start filming a diary. I wanted to free myself from cinematographic practice as a constant exercise of projection and representation, and find a living cinema that would reflect the extraordinary quotidian side of life, with everything that usually remains on the sidelines, on the edges of a film. Without scripts, without projections, the camera would become an accomplice to some moments of life that would remain stored on celluloid until the day they would be revealed – a kind of metabolism of the image, where the practice of filming would be nothing more than a vital metabolic exercise. The images would thus become a mere capture of energies – spectral, historical, emotional. is a rite in the form of a film that spans from a conversation with my father A ÁRVORE – artist, musician, and mystic of the forest – Guilherme Vaz, someone who lived and reflected on the frontier, on the fatal advance of modernity over the peoples of the earth, someone who wrote music instinctively, who thought of cinema as his “spiritual father” and, above all, whose life was his greatest work.’
IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA (É NOITE NA AMÉRICA), 2021–2022, 66′
On the wings of Brazil’s aeroplane-shaped capital city – a necropolis transformed into an oasis by architects – thousands of trapped lives seek refuge in its gardens. IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA (É NOITE NA AMÉRICA) was filmed at Brasília Zoo, home to hundreds of rescued species fleeing the violence of agribusiness, urbanisation and the pollution of the Brazilian cerrado. As a nocturnal feast shot on expired 16mm film – a material also in danger of extinction – this immersive work casts an animalistic spell with shades of eco-horror, wildlife fictions, and documentary, subverting the limits of cinematic genres. Giant anteaters and otters, maned wolves, owls, and capybaras meet with biologists, veterinarians, caretakers and the environmental police in a sombre plot where the challenges of preserving life weave a web of intersecting perspectives. In the end, who are the real captives?
The works will be screened in the original language with Lithuanian and English subtitles.
Total duration: 1 hour 27 minutes.